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You don't have to worry if you've never heard of innoDisk before, as the company mostly makes solutions for the embedded market rather than the consumer market and as such it's not a company you'd come in contact with regularly. During Composec last week, innoDisk was showing off some of its new storage products, including what is currently the world's fastest mini PCIe DOM as well as some other interesting products.

You don't have to worry if you've never heard of innoDisk before, as the company mostly makes solutions for the embedded market rather than the consumer market and as such it's not a company you'd come in contact with regularly. During Composec last week, innoDisk was showing off some of its new storage products, including what is currently the world's fastest mini PCIe DOM as well as some other interesting products.

Although a mini PCIe DOM (Disk on Module) looks identical to an mSATA SSD, the mini PCIe DOM uses the PCI Express interface as the name implies, rather than the SATA interface. The downside of a PCI Express connected SSD is of course that most computers won't boot from it and that's pretty much how the mSATA standard came up. That said, innoDisk is offering some impressive performance figures from its second generation mini PCIe DOM as the company is promising read speeds of 330MB/s and write speeds of 160MB/s which is up there with full-size 2.5-inch SSDs.

The company also offers mSATA SSDs, but these have much lower speeds of 120MB/s for reads and 110MB/s for writes, but at least the write speed compares favourably to that of Intel's 310 series of mSATA SSD's which top out at 70MB/s, although Intel does offer much better read performance at up to 200MB/s depending on model.

Other peculiarities that we spotted at innoDisk's booth included their new EverGreen Plus series of MLC SSDs which comes with a six year warranty. However, innoDisk suggests that this series of SSDs' are best for usage scenarios where files of 128KB or smaller are written to the SSD which seems to be a very limited market. The performance figures aren't impressive either with read speeds of 180MB/s and write speeds of a mere 55MB/s, but it's not always about speed everywhere an SSD is used and we're sure that there are plenty of vertical markets where this SSD would find a comfortable home.

Next up we have an SSD with a SAS 6Gbps (Serial Attached SCSI) interface, although it seems like innoDisk needs to get their hands on some much faster NAND Flash here as this drive offer read speeds of 190MB/s but unless it's a typo on the little sign, write speeds of a mere 30MB/s. That said, this is an interesting product if you take into account that Intel will offer native SAS support on its high-end LGA-2011 consumer platform later this year and it's likely that we'll be seeing a lot more SAS SSD's as we get closer to that launch.

Finally innoDisk was showing off its CFast cards, yet again a standard that hasn't really taken off outside of the embedded market. CFast cards are meant to replace the Compact Flash standard at some stage and rely on the SATA interface instead of the almost defunct IDE interface which CF cards use. innoDisk's CFast cards offer read speeds of 120MB/s and write speeds of 100MB/s and are of course SATA 3Gbps compliant. The only downside is that due to their relative small size, CFast cards require a passive adaptor to be attached to a computer; much like CF cards do, although of course a USB card reader would work as well.

innoDisk might not be target the consumer market space directly, but many of the products the company showed off at Composec do have consumer applications and we suggested that they'd consider the consumer upgrade market with some of its more exotic products. The representative we talked to said that innoDisk will be launching faster mSATA SSD products with performance similar to that of its second generation mini PCI DOM and if the price is right, we can see a reasonable demand from performance hungry consumers that want a faster mSATA SSD in their notebook.